A photographer and a painter walk into a Revolutionary War reenactment.

What ensues isn’t a punchline but an exploration into how different types of artists can negotiate the same truth. In fact, the three new exhibits at the Tippecanoe Arts Federation — which include the joint show by photographer Dwayne Daehler and painter Daniel Driggs, titled “Looking into Faces from the Past” — couldn’t be more different, yet they all challenge the viewer to think both broadly and deeply about what they’re seeing.

“Looking into Faces from the Past” is a collection of portraits of historic reenactors in Indiana. A reenactment is already an appropriation of actual events. Daehler and Driggs heightened that inherent truthiness by bringing certain elements to the center of attention, while omitting or washing away what they saw as irrelevant.

Driggs noticed a mother holding a baby who had inky, distant eyes, so he painted the child’s melancholic gaze and kept the mother out of the frame. Daehler also created a story using artistic emphasis. He noticed a man dressed as a Scottish Highland soldier who had a particularly embattled demeanor. So he used Photoshop to heighten the resolution of his wrinkles and bring out the colors and contours of his face.

“I wanted people to see he’s had a rough life and endured the hardships of a soldier,” Daehler said. “There’s something in his eyes that suggest a weariness to me. He’s not a gung-ho type of soldier. He’s just doing his duty.”

Driggs and Daehler aren’t the only artists showcased in the TAF’s second summer lineup, running Friday to Aug. 1, to give still images the gravitas of classic storytelling.

With “Seated Woman” — part of Tuesday Night Inkers’ showcase in the West Gallery, “A Pressing Matter and Other Challenges” — artist Lauren Ehrmann depicts hardship through folded arms, pencil-thin eyelids and a posture that suggests both resting and shielding.

In another piece, “Empty Chair,” Ehrmann uses point of view and the absence of character to tell a tale of — what? Abandonment? Memory? That’s for anyone to decide.

Yet it may be “Flora Graphis,” Craig Martin’s explosive showcase of color and shape, that most obviously highlights how art can be more than meets the eye. In Martin’s case, that’s because it rises past eye level.

Eight-foot-tall pieces of painted hardboard are mounted a few inches off the floors and walls of the TAF’s most open space, the East Gallery. They create imposing outlines that, under the room’s yellow-white spotlights, cast a complex assortment of shadows. The drawings here are no more important than the canvasses they inhabit, which Martin sawed into shapes that resemble wild foliage.

“I’ve always been fascinated with trees and silhouettes and wanted to do something less traditional than a square panel,” Martin said.

By shaping his pieces so deliberately, Martin does what John Coltrane, the modernists and Einstein did — not just challenge limitations but also explore the very idea of boundaries. One of Martin’s pieces cracked in half while he was painting it in his garage. So he turned an accident into an integral part of the work, and titled the piece “The Broke Tree.” The result is a tree-shaped tangle of red, pink, green and blue, with a Dr. Seuss-inspired spray-painted shadow in the center — chaos harnessed into art. “I liked it better broken,” he said.

“I’m making problems for myself,” Martin added. “I do something, and it either goes completely bad, or it takes me somewhere else that I really enjoy. I don’t like to know exactly where I’m going all the time.”

The portraits in “Looking into Faces from the Past” also work from spontaneity, since none of them are posed. These are real-world expressions turned into individual narratives. While Martin’s works blossom because of their literal three-dimensionality, Driggs and Daehler’s portraits come to life because they’re of three-dimensional characters. Daehler, who most recently visited the Spirit of Vincennes Rendezvous, has oftentimes been mistaken for a photojournalist. He said he does more than just capture reality. But he doesn’t create fiction, either. Rather, he embellishes what he sees.

“I don’t want to give off the impression that I changed things,” Daehler said. “You can only bring out what is already there.”

If you go

What: “Looking into Faces from the Past,” “A Pressing Matter and Other Challenges” and “Flora Graphis”